Introduce yourself...

Thought it would be cool to have a post where we can get a sense of who is contributing to the community. The format I propose would be to introduce ourselves and then shortly explain our background and how we use Pix4D software. Feel free to add more information :)

I'll start...I'm Pierangelo and I'm a Technical Support Engineer at Pix4D in Switzerland. I get to work on a large range of projects with the software, my favorites being new experimental applications, such as underwater projects or indoors in complex environments. I mostly use the desktop software, but I'm familiar with Pix4Dcapture and the Cloud as well.

I am Veronica, I am part of the Pix4D marketing team in Switzerland, I am responsible for exploring and communicating the potential of Pix4Dmodel. I love projects that use the mesh in a creative way, to create VR and AR experiences, to create video games, for marketing, for real estate, for spatial design, product design, and 3D printing.

I am an architect, I am passionate about art, design, diving, and raspberry cakes.

Looks like I get to be the first non-Pix4D employee to say hello here.

I am Adam, a Florida licensed Professional Engineer, and I run my own business in the USA to do Reality Capture for the purpose of engineering analysis, with the primary focus on cell towers. Working at the engineering level instead of the survey level has been quite a challenge for both hardware and software. I have tested everything I can get my hands on and Pix4D is the only viable solution out there. All of this high-end testing pushes the limits in Pix4D so I try to give as much help as I can to the Community here, while not revealing my trade secrets or patent-pending information :)

I am Javier, I am a Civil Engineer and live in Mexico in the state of Queretaro.

I am a CEO of Corporativo G2, that includes a company for Quality control of construction and soil mechanics (G2 Ingenieria para la Construccion SA de CV), a company for sustainable development, territorial order, maps of risk (G2 Ingenieria y Desarrollo Sostenible SC), and a company for drone services (G2 Unmanned Systems SC), since yesterday i have a license for pix4d, that i tihink is the most powerfull software actually, i have tried many softwares but i am really convinced that pix4d is the software.

We have a Sucursal in Peru.

Next week I started the master in engineering and drone operation, i like all sports , movies and travel.

Antonio Anelli, graduated in Civil Engineering at University of Bari (Italy) in 1982, began his activity in the Civil Engineering acquiring the basic knowledge as a self employed engineer in developing civil building’s projects. He spent more than thirty years in the field of constructions in Italy. Since from 1976, during his university studies, he took an interest in architectural photogrammetry, thanks to Professor Engineer Antonio Daddabbo, and at the moment he is dealing with aerophotogrammetry and surveying.

In 2015 Antonio Anelli bought his first UAV (Drone), a DJI Phantom2 Vision Plus, and decided to explore its capabilities in aerophotogrammetry, becoming a certified ENAC (EnteNazionaleAviazioneCivile - Italian Civil Aviation Organization) Operator. His first architectural survey was the roof of an ancient church in Gravina di Puglia (BA-Italy), made using his first drone and a dedicated software. From that first experience, on March 2016 he followed a workshop in Lausanne (Switzerland), at EPFL (EcolePolitecnique Federal of Lausanne), to acquire basic knowledge for imagery postprocessing and from June 2016 he owns a regular license of one of the most famous programm for 3D rendering: Pix4DMapper Pro. On December 2016 he became a certified UAV's pilot and now he owns four UAVs and a multispectral camera Sequoia which make possible a lot of works using his appareils. His last works are the survey of two castles (Bovino and San Marco La Catola) in Apulia/Italy. At the moment he is working for a presentation at WEF2017 (World Engineering Forum) which will be held in Rome on November 2017, under UNESCO patronate.

Wynand Uys, in the NE of South Africa, from a town called Hoedspruit. I'll be using photographs to illustrate my introduction because the environment we operate in is quite different to what most community members are familiar with.

We operate a fleet of hot air balloons (for paying passengers) and two fixed-wing aircraft. No, not fixed-wing drones but 'real' aircraft that people sit in! Sorry, I had to include that little dig aimed at the drone industry. Nowadays, when you present aerial survey projects, people assume that a drone was used.

We got involved in aerial photography because part of our work is to provide air support to the folks who protect rhino in the nature reserves that are associated with Kruger National Park.

As an added capability to simple, human eyeball surveillance, our involvement in photography started with batches of oblique or nadir images to record events and locations of animals, people, and cars.

Driven by the conservation industry's demand for information on the whereabouts and movements of animals, their numbers and the state of vegetation, we became formally involved in photographic census of large mammals, particularly rhino, buffalo and elephant.

The more products we delivered, the more we were encouraged to develop new kinds of projects. One of these projects is to annually determine sex and age ratios within each population (or herd) with really high resolution images.

Needing ever larger composite images of large herds of animals, I (naively) considered photogrammetry as a possible solution. Of course this did not work because of the dynamic nature of the scenes. Unless we could gather all the images for a single composite in a matter of seconds, there was too much movement of subjects and even if the ortho was successfully constructed, there were headless animals and some with two heads and also ghostly, transparent duplicates of animals. We adapted our photo-gathering techniques and for live animal studies we now only use panoramic stitching.

BUT: By fooling around with Pix4D in 2014 (initially for the wrong purpose), we stumbled across new products that were immediately in demand. Terrain modelling, vegetation mapping, demographic studies, agriculture, forestry management, land rehabilitation and more. Now we're quite heavily invested (for a small business) in two aircraft, three pilots, substantial computing power, three High-end DSLR's with pretty good lenses and a MicaSense RedEdge. I was very pleased, about two years ago, when Pix4D offered me the permanent license at a price discounted by all the monthly subs that I had previously paid. Photogrammetry has become an essential tool for us and I am pleased with the ever increasing capabilities contained in the updates.

Although I realise that Pix4D evolution is driven by the drone industry more than anything else, I am pleased that it works well with piloted fixed-wing aircraft. We may suffer the disadvantage of a minimum high speed of about 65kt (120km/h) and a more costly platform, but high speed and no altitude restrictions mean we can survey ten's of thousands of hectares in a day. We can stay airborne for 6 hours non-stop (even longer, but that leads to fatigue). That means we can fly to a survey area (cheaper than driving there), complete a large chunk of work, usually all of it, and return home on the same day without landing.

With the fast shutter speeds now available in high-end DSLR's we find that aircraft speed is not much of a limitation anymore. Although most of our projects are thousands of hectares in extent, some even hundreds of thousands of hectares at GSD 15 - 30cm/pixel we can also manage smaller projects at 4cm/pixel. That's about as high-res as we can go unless we use a slower aircraft or a camera intervalometer that can fire more rapidly than 1 activation/second.

Two days ago, we ventured into archaeology for the first time. We departed from our airfield at 9am, arrived at the remote and relatively inaccessible project area 200km away from base just before 10am, surveyed 2 sq. km at 4cm/pixel and arrived back at our hangar by 11:30. Pix4D ran overnight and I have, in front of me a beautiful model of ancient ruins and surrounding landscape.

This project would have been well suited for a drone survey, but the client was unsuccessful in getting clearance for a drone flight inside the Kruger National Park at short notice. Thank to our existing involvement as an air service in the Kruger Park we got instant clearance and the project is in the bag.

We have been so busy with protected wildlife areas that we have yet to develop agricultural products. The customers are waiting and the MicaSense Rededge is gathering dust.

My wish is that Pix4D continues with its fantastic work, developing the capabilities that support the drone industry without forgetting that the software is also used by piloted aircraft and very large projects, often with as many as 10 000 images.

I am Selim, and I am working as a GIS Data Technician for a precision agriculture company in New Brunswick, Canada. I am primarily focused on processing agriculture data using different sensors and different camera models, mostly RGB and Multi-Spectral datasets. I really enjoy experimenting agriculture related different settings in Pix4D and compare them to the previous settings. I am always looking the improve productivity and the quality of the orthomosaics for different conditions.

I am Anggi, working as an GIS Officer for oil palm/rubber company in Indonesia. Beside focusing on GIS matter, I also responsible on producing aerial orthophoto in our plantation. I am using ebee as drone platform and P4D as main image processing.

My name is Joseph A Bailey IV, I am a student at the University of Montana. I working on a project that basically is "learning how to use Pix4D". I have learned really quickly that there isn't much information out on the internet about the general use and work flow of Pix4D. I'm hoping that the support community will help fill that void in information.

My name is Salmen, from Fiji. Situated in the South Pacific.
I'm the Chief UAV Pilot of Drone Services Fiji. We do aerial mapping amd surveying. With the background of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, I'm a newbie with Photogrammetry. I have self taught myself to use Pix4D so far by viewing videos and readimg forums.
I'm looking forward to learning alot more here in this community.
My biggest challenge is on creating DTMS and contours of classified pointclouds. I'm missing something on the processing, that everytime the DSM and DTM is of the initial pointcloud and not that of the edited. I have tried exporting the group pointcloud amd then reimporting it to project file and then start with process 3 DSM and Othor... But it not working.
Hoping someone here is able to help me on this.

For the DSM and DTM generation, see here the official post Problems to generate DTM(as it is stated in the above-mentioned post, step 3 needs to be reprocessed for your point cloud editing to be taken into account)